I've just seen an artifact, called Starfire on page 73 of the Ghostwalk campaign option book. It was forged from adamantine taken from a burning meteorite that struck deep in the heart of the forest of Sura-Khiri. (I think I've seen references to adamantine being created by meteorites in other D&D books.)

Has anyone seen any other references to what is in the sky *cough* Wildspace *cough* around the world that Manifest is on?

I see a reference to the Chant of Memory being celebrated on the longest day of the year on page 80, so that suggests that the world of Manifest may have a similar sort of axil-tilt to our own world, with Manifest's world having the same sort of four seasons that we have.

The section on Eanius, on pages 82-83, mentions the spring equinox, planetary conjunctions and eclipses. That implies a moon exists, and that it is a similar size to the world's sun.

The description of Orcus (page 85) mentions that clerics treat the nights of new moons (and the last day of the year) as holy days, so I'm thinking that the moon would need to have at least a few orbits around the world every year (even if it doesn't orbit the world once per month).

Has anyone seen any other references of what might be going on in "Manifestspace"?

Big Mac wrote:(I think I've seen references to adamantine being created by meteorites in other D&D books.)

3.5 DMG, page 283. "Found only in meteorites and the rarest of veins in magical areas..."

When the Sky Falls by Bruce Cordell, page 8: "Many strange properties are attributed to meteorite ores. For instance, adamantine may be found in some rare meteors, but only in small quantities (about 1,000 gp worth of adamantine may be found in a standard meteoric strike)."

Volo's Guide to All Things Magical: "Adamant is rarely found in nature, but when it is, it is always be in large spherical pockets in hardened volcanic flows."

Big Mac wrote:(I think I've seen references to adamantine being created by meteorites in other D&D books.)

3.5 DMG, page 283. "Found only in meteorites and the rarest of veins in magical areas..."

When the Sky Falls by Bruce Cordell, page 8: "Many strange properties are attributed to meteorite ores. For instance, adamantine may be found in some rare meteors, but only in small quantities (about 1,000 gp worth of adamantine may be found in a standard meteoric strike)."

Volo's Guide to All Things Magical: "Adamant is rarely found in nature, but when it is, it is always be in large spherical pockets in hardened volcanic flows."

Thanks Rip.

I wonder if adamantine exists in rocks in space, or if the heat of a meteorite buring up in the atmosphere of a planet converts ordinary space metal into adamantine.

What if the Ghostwalk planet was flat, and the other side was where the True Afterlife was? And the sun and moon were literally the same size (type A) and they moved between the mortal world and the realm of the dead every day?

An alternative: the True Afterlife isn't literally the other side of the world, but it parallels (is coeexistant with) the other side of the (flat) world on another plane of existence and the sun and moon shift between the Material Plane and the other one.

Big Mac wrote:(I think I've seen references to adamantine being created by meteorites in other D&D books.)

3.5 DMG, page 283. "Found only in meteorites and the rarest of veins in magical areas..."

When the Sky Falls by Bruce Cordell, page 8: "Many strange properties are attributed to meteorite ores. For instance, adamantine may be found in some rare meteors, but only in small quantities (about 1,000 gp worth of adamantine may be found in a standard meteoric strike)."

Volo's Guide to All Things Magical: "Adamant is rarely found in nature, but when it is, it is always be in large spherical pockets in hardened volcanic flows."

Thanks Rip.

I wonder if adamantine exists in rocks in space, or if the heat of a meteorite buring up in the atmosphere of a planet converts ordinary space metal into adamantine.

Volo's Guide to All Things Magical defines the terms this way:
Adamantite: A jet-black, ferromagnetic ore.Adamant: A gleaming, glossy black metal smelted from adamantite ore, hard but brittle. Any reflections seen in the surface appear to have rainbow edges.Adamantine: An alloy produced from five-eighths adamant, one-eighth electrum, and two-eighths silver. Black, but shines green in candlelight and white-violet under magical radiance.

If adamantite (the ore form of adamant) can be found in "the rarest of magical veins" and/or "hardened volcanic flows" on Oerth/Toril, it stands to reason this can happen on smaller worlds as well, including asteroids.

Volo's Guide to All Things Magical adds a wrinkle: through a combination of arcane magic, divine magic, alchemy, and smithcraft (and possibly other arts), adamantine (the alloy) can be derived from a combination of steel and mithral. Which... feels like something that was just added in order to explain some dubious previous canon. If the only way to turn mithral into adamantine is via miraculous arcane transmutation, there's no real connection between the two metals, any more than the fact that you can use magic to turn lead into gold would imply anything other than that magic can do pretty much anything you want it to.

However, why is adamantite associated with volcanism? Could it be that the geological processes of volcanoes and the heat of reentry both approximate the alchemical/arcane/divine processes that transmute mithral into adamant?

Or, alternatively, maybe adamant is a substance native to the mantles of planets, and it's occasionally belched up with magma, and is sometimes found in asteroids that are smashed up pieces of ancient planets that once had mantles. But if that's the case, why does it form spherical pockets? Consider this instead: that adamant is the core of worlds, the foundation that spherical planets build themselves around, and the spherical deposits miners discover are the seeds of future worlds, planetary offspring that might one day, if left alone, become worlds in their own right.

The larger a setting is, the less sense the idea of all dead souls going to a single area makes. If wanting to combine Ghostwalk with Spelljammer, I would suggest using something like a black hole that's drawing souls toward a single planet suspended on its event horizon, and say that the Underworld Wind is a gravitational force drawing all life toward this singularity. Is the True Afterlife really on the other side?

ripvanwormer wrote:What if the Ghostwalk planet was flat, and the other side was where the True Afterlife was? And the sun and moon were literally the same size (type A) and they moved between the mortal world and the realm of the dead every day?

That's an interesting way to go.

I guess...if you were going to go down that route, that it would probably make sense to put Manifest in the centre of the world, and make the Gate of Souls a hole that allows souls to flow downward from the top-side to the underside.

The only thing I would say is that - if someone tried to run a Ghostwalk crystal sphere (Manifestspace) with this setup, they could presumably travel to the True Afterlife and back.

Plus you would need an alternative method to make the seasons work. I guess the Sun would need to have a variable orbit (a circle on a circle) that pushes it closer and further away from the topside of the flatworld. (The underside would naturally get the reverse seasons, that way.)

ripvanwormer wrote:An alternative: the True Afterlife isn't literally the other side of the world, but it parallels (is coeexistant with) the other side of the (flat) world on another plane of existence and the sun and moon shift between the Material Plane and the other one.

Well this works a bit better (from a Spelljammer point of view) but if you are going to have an underside, I would have thought that would need to have sunlight too.

I suppose that the main advantage with the flat earth theory is that it does not require the invention of a bunch of celestial bodies that Sean K Reynolds and Monty Cook didn't create. It would mean that there was less going on in Wildspace, but that would also tie-in better with a Spelljammer campaign, where ships have to fly to the world and travel to Manifest to "get their dead crew brought back".

Big Mac wrote:Well this works a bit better (from a Spelljammer point of view) but if you are going to have an underside, I would have thought that would need to have sunlight too.

Even if it wasn't literally the afterlife, I would definitely make the underside lifeless and uninhabitable, except by undead. The point is to illustrate the central dichotomy of the setting—life and death—with a two-sided world. Everything we know about the world is located a single side, anyway.

Thinking about it further, I'd include both a Luna-like moon—silvery, pitted, airless, populated by undead and the ruins of a lost civilization—and a smaller, jungle-covered moon filled with yuan-ti. The jungle moon would be the "demiplane" of Coil mentioned in the Ghostwalk campaign setting. It's not really a demiplane, but the yuan-ti use portals and planewalking spells to travel from their moon to the planet. I'd probably give Coil a longer orbit so that it only appeared moon-sized during certain times of the year, or perhaps decade, with yuan-ti attacks growing more frequent during those periods.

Incorporeal undead could travel from the dead moon and back by flying through space, more easily during high tide. Perhaps the ethereal current that draws the souls of the dead toward the Veil of Souls is also connected to the tides, particularly if the moon shifts through the planes in its daily cycle. If the moon is connected to rises in undead, that would explain why the trees of the Spirit Wood grow more active and willful in moonlight.

Perhaps there should also be a shattered moon, even more distant, to provide a cloud of asteroids and account for meteor strikes.

I don't think the Ghostwalk world is officially named, so I suggest calling it Ghol if you don't have a better idea. This is based on nothing in particular, except it sounds a little like "ghoul."

Big Mac wrote:Well this works a bit better (from a Spelljammer point of view) but if you are going to have an underside, I would have thought that would need to have sunlight too.

Even if it wasn't literally the afterlife, I would definitely make the underside lifeless and uninhabitable, except by undead. The point is to illustrate the central dichotomy of the setting—life and death—with a two-sided world. Everything we know about the world is located a single side, anyway.

Hmm. Well at the risk of derailing my own topic this is quite interesting, so I'll carry on with it.

I suppose that, a flatworld doesn't really need to have different celestial mechanics to work in a Spelljammer context. If you replaced our own Earth with a flatworld, that was tilted over at the same angle as our real-planet, you could get a 24 hour day night cycle and a 12 month season cycle.

The main difference would be that day would be day everywhere (on that one side) and night would be night everywhere.

You could still have a "north pole" and a "south pole" but I'm not sure they would stay cold all year. I think the pole would be cold during the "winter" and hot during the "summer".

I'm still not totally convinced that a flatworld makes sense for Ghostwalk, but I think it's a viable option worth considering.

Another option would be to use Hollow Earth logic. That could actually locate the True Afterlife inside Manifest's planet. And if you want to have undead inside there too, the way to do that could be to have no inner sun.

But, I might be tempted to skip all of that, go back to a conventional world, but to have an inner core made entirely of ectoplasm.

ripvanwormer wrote:Thinking about it further, I'd include both a Luna-like moon—silvery, pitted, airless, populated by undead and the ruins of a lost civilization—and a smaller, jungle-covered moon filled with yuan-ti. The jungle moon would be the "demiplane" of Coil mentioned in the Ghostwalk campaign setting. It's not really a demiplane, but the yuan-ti use portals and planewalking spells to travel from their moon to the planet. I'd probably give Coil a longer orbit so that it only appeared moon-sized during certain times of the year, or perhaps decade, with yuan-ti attacks growing more frequent during those periods.

If you are going to make Coil into another celestial body, why make it a moon? If it was another planet (G-Venus or G-Mars) it would get closer and further away from the world of Manifest.

And if yuan-ti are carrying out a "planetary invasion" it might be possible to put them up in wildspace too.

ripvanwormer wrote:Incorporeal undead could travel from the dead moon and back by flying through space, more easily during high tide. Perhaps the ethereal current that draws the souls of the dead toward the Veil of Souls is also connected to the tides, particularly if the moon shifts through the planes in its daily cycle. If the moon is connected to rises in undead, that would explain why the trees of the Spirit Wood grow more active and willful in moonlight.

I like this. It doesn't feel totally right to me, but I was already thinking of people in wildspace dying and being drawn towards Manifest on the Ethereal Current.

Take that further and have Ethereal Tides (governed by the Moon) and you could have spacefaring undead who have learned how to sail on those tides. Perhaps undead spellcasters could use lifejammer helms and death helms, as if they were normal spelljamming helms being used by living people.

I didn't see that about the trees in the Spirit Wood growing more active in moonlight. I'll have to check that.

Anyhoo, I must look for some more canon stuff to use as inspiration. I did find the Skystones. They came from outer space.

ripvanwormer wrote:Perhaps there should also be a shattered moon, even more distant, to provide a cloud of asteroids and account for meteor strikes.

Personally, I'd rather have a planetary system, with some other places to travel to.

ripvanwormer wrote:I don't think the Ghostwalk world is officially named, so I suggest calling it Ghol if you don't have a better idea. This is based on nothing in particular, except it sounds a little like "ghoul."

Where did you get "Ghol" from?

If I was going to invent a name, I'd be tempted to do something that is connected to Sean K Reynolds or perhaps Monte Cook.

Thanks for all these suggestions. It's making me realise some of the things I might "need" from a Ghostwalk crystal sphere.

Big Mac wrote:I suppose that, a flatworld doesn't really need to have different celestial mechanics to work in a Spelljammer context. If you replaced our own Earth with a flatworld, that was tilted over at the same angle as our real-planet, you could get a 24 hour day night cycle and a 12 month season cycle.

The main difference would be that day would be day everywhere (on that one side) and night would be night everywhere.

I'm suggesting the sun vanishes into another plane of existence during the night, so one side has a day/night cycle and the other only experiences darkness. But short of that, the other side could still be barren for other reasons.

You could still have a "north pole" and a "south pole" but I'm not sure they would stay cold all year. I think the pole would be cold during the "winter" and hot during the "summer".

There are (at least) two different models for this.

1. Terry Pratchett's Discworld has only one "pole," a mountain in the center of the disc called Cori Celesti. This is the coldest part of the world, surrounded by an arctic circle, then a temperate climate, and finally a tropical climate along the Disc's rim (because the sun comes closer to the rim in its daily cycle than it does the hub). Only one side of the disc is inhabitable. Night happens when the sun is on the other side of the Disc, underneath the legs of the elephants who stand on the turtle's back. Day doesn't happen all at once because the speed of light is very slow on the Disc (the Disc's magical field slows the speed of light).

2. Modern YouTube flat earthers teach that the north pole is actually a cold region in the center of the flat world, then a temperate zone surrounding that, then a tropical zone, then another temperate zone. There's also an antarctic region along the world's rim. The world is surrounded by a wall of ice, which is why nothing falls off it. This wall of ice is what NASA's conspiracy would have us believe is the south pole. As far as I can tell, the justification here is that the sun orbits above the Earth's tropical zone, so both the ice wall and the north pole are further away from it. The sun is, if I understand this right, always facing the top side of the flat earth, but night happens when the sun is above the opposite semicircle from where you are, which also explains time zones. I think the sun is very small and when it's over the opposite semicircle it's too small to see?

In both cases they don't deal with the possibility of another inhabitable side of the world, since gravity is assumed to go in a single direction. The way the Discworld works is actually compatible with Spelljammer physics because the Disc lies on top of a giant turtle, and since the turtle's gravity plane is larger than the Disc's it takes precedence (although starbeasts don't normally have gravity planes in Spelljammer).

Another option would be to use Hollow Earth logic. That could actually locate the True Afterlife inside Manifest's planet. And if you want to have undead inside there too, the way to do that could be to have no inner sun.

That's another possibility.

But, I might be tempted to skip all of that, go back to a conventional world, but to have an inner core made entirely of ectoplasm.

Why is the inner core made of ectoplasm? Is it filled with dead ghosts?

If you are going to make Coil into another celestial body, why make it a moon? If it was another planet (G-Venus or G-Mars) it would get closer and further away from the world of Manifest.

I'm assuming a geocentric cosmology, so all of the planets other than the primary are effectively moons. The idea is that everything would literally center around Ghostwalk's planet. I thought of Coil as a moon so that it would be more prominent in the sky, though obviously that's not essential.

If you wanted to add planets to the system that weren't moons, one possibility is Ranais, a world detailed briefly in the Planescape adventure Dead Gods. Ranais was once a world that venerated gods of the dead, but when one city, Moil, turned away from the worship of Orcus, Orcus tore the city from the world and cast it into a demiplane, and the rest of the planet was "hurled into cataclysm and chaos." The world is now dead, and haunted by undead. The sun is "tiny and white in the sky," which suggests that if it's in the same system as the Ghostwalk planet, it's much further away from the sun. The main reason to place Ranais in the same sphere as Ghostwalk is the Orcus connection. There's also a Monte Cook connection, since Monte Cook wrote Dead Gods.

Anyhoo, I must look for some more canon stuff to use as inspiration. I did find the Skystones. They came from outer space.

The Skystones look to me like the remnants of another Manifest, somewhere on some other world or perhaps built on an asteroid, that shattered and fell to the Ghostwalk planet. They still have some of the same properties that the Manifest of Ghostwalk's world has, and perhaps they even have tiny portals to the True Afterlife. There might be other pieces of the golden, shattered Manifest-like city still floating in space.

Personally, I'd rather have a planetary system, with some other places to travel to.

That's understandable, I guess. One extreme possibility is to turn all of the nations described in the Ghostwalk sourcebook into planets. Otherwise, it's difficult to carry the themes of a setting centered around a single city across multiple planets, which is why I'm fixated on the idea of dead worlds, shattered or otherwise broken, as examples of what might happen to the Ghostwalk planet.

Perhaps besides dead worlds, there are also worlds that have been raided or colonized or otherwise attacked by the yuan-ti in Coil's long orbit through the sphere.

Where did you get "Ghol" from?

I made it up. The first three letters are the same as "Ghost." In the context of this thread I have to call it "the Ghostwalk world/planet," which is cumbersome. In the context of a homebrew version of Ghostwalk, I'd definitely give it a proper name. If Ranais is part of the same system, maybe all the planets have the same suffix, so the Ghostwalk planet could be Ghonais or Gholais.

As long as I'm wildly speculating, here's a list of potential Ghostspace worlds:

Ferais: A steamy jungle world, close to the sun, pitted with ruins and craters and abominations left over from wars with the yuan-ti. Its manifest zone is a corrupted ruin. Ghosts can still access the afterlife through it, but the ruin is currently too dangerous for living folk to remain in for long, unless they want to transform into aberrations.Gholais: A temperate world with a functioning city called Manifest built over its manifest zone.Aurais: Once a golden world covered with beautiful cities and ruled by powerful mages, now completely shattered and nothing but debris drifting through space. Sometimes bits of Aurais crash into other worlds in this system.Ranais: The most distant world from the sun, this planet is cold and dead and haunted by undead after it was destroyed by a unique, epic-level spell or artifact activated by Orcus. Once a city called Moil was built around a manifest zone on this world, but Moil has been cast into a demiplane and shrouded by eternal night. Without its manifest zone the world was flooded by ghosts unable to reach the afterlife, and all life on the planet died. Coil: A rogue planet, demiplane, or moon that comes closer to different planets in its long, eccentric orbit.

If I was going to invent a name, I'd be tempted to do something that is connected to Sean K Reynolds or perhaps Monte Cook.